"Japhy
Ryder," says poet Allen Ginsberg, looming in the background of The
Dharma Bums behind the somewhat symbolic mask of Alvah Goldbook, "is
a great new hero of American culture."

And the fact of the
matter is that he is also the hero of The Dharma Bums not essentially
because of his and Kerouac's devotion to Buddha but because he represents,
perhaps as perfectly as anyone can, a unity of the hipsterism, the Paul
Bunyan travelogue and all the other spontaneous and classic American
forces that have helped create the Beat Generation.

"I
was amazed at the way he meditated with his eyes open," wrote
Kerouac. "And I was mostly humanly amazed that this tremendous
little guy who eagerly studied Oriental poetry and anthropology and
ornithology and everything else in the books and was a tough little
adventurer of trails and mountains should also suddenly whip out his
pitiful beautiful wooden prayerbeads and solemnly pray there, like an
oldfashioned saint of the deserts certainly, but so amazing to see it
in America with its steel mills and airfields. . ."

Undismayed by contradiction,
Snyder finds no need to reconcile the place he has established for himself
within American culture and his place without it.

"When I say I
reject Western civilization," he explained, "I certainly don't
mean I reject the use of the intellect and logic. I mean I don t have
any use for the alienating and contradictory culture of the last 300
years, which is destructive and anti-human, in spite of the admirable---abstractly---development
of science. A steam engine is, by itself, a beautiful and admirable
thing, a real tribute to the human mind. It's the way it gets used and
the way people let it use them that goes wrong. The achievement of Western
philosophy in logical, clear thinking is one of the most precious things
in the world. And Buddhism has much to learn from Western philosophy
in this regard. I am a Buddhist because I think Buddhism has the means
to lead to personal insight and the capacity for intuitively making
moral choices. But for putting moral choices into effective action in
the world, one must be capable of clear and analytical thought, of accurate
exposition, of using and organizing facts. So, the West isn't so much
bad as it is sick, and the lacking in faith in the intuitive mind."

And yet Snyder's own
intuition, although he doesn't credit it to the West, is certainly a
product of the Far West. It is, there, from strange seeds blown by fresh
winds, that America's new intuition is growing.

"This is largely
a big rural movement," he says, sounding rural himself, with an
affected country twang, Far Western, hayseed and cracker-barrel, but
speaking also with an interlacing of hip colloquialisms and evident
erudition that at the same time dispelled any corn from what he had
to say. "Like the kids coming into San Francisco and going down
to North Beach these days, they're not from the cities mostly, but from
the farms or back wood, where they've been working in isolation, hatching,
sort of, writing their poetry or reading or just thinking, picking up
on all sorts of ideas, and now they're bringing this great rural culture
to the urban centers. See, you city fellers don't have any monopoly
on culture."

Actually, Snyder himself
was born in San Francisco. "My parents were extremely poor---the
Depression," he said. "So they went back to Seattle, my father's
home town, and got a tarpaper shack and an acre of stumpland out north
of town. Over the years, my father built the place up, fenced it, got
another acre, fixed the house, built a barn and got cows and chickens.
I was brought up a farmboy with chickens to feed and a milk route to
our neighbors. My mother was, and is, a very high-strung, neurotic person
with literary ambitions, and farm life and poverty wore her down. She
was, and is, impossible, but she got me onto books and poetry at the
age of five. When I was seven, I burned my feet badly while burning
brush, and for four months couldn't walk. So my folks brought me piles
of books from the Seattle public library and it was then I really learned
to read and from that time on was voracious---I figure that accident
changed my life. At the end of four months, I had read more than most
kids do by the time they're 18. And I didn't stop. I was hung up on
American Indians and nature all through childhood and hated civilization
for having, fucked up the Indians, as described in Ernest Thompson Seton's
Book of the Woodcraft Indians, my bible still, and for ruining
the woods and soil---which I could see going on all about me.

"So when I say
I am anarchist today and don't have much use for Western culture, I
guess it goes pretty far back. I spent most of my spare time as a kid
in the woods around our place and, feeling at home there, always felt
uncomfortable when we went into Seattle. In high school---we had moved
to Portland on account of the war---I took to spending my summers in
the Cascade Mountains and did a lot of real mountaineering---glaciers
and all that---Mount Hood, Baker, Rainier, Shasta, Adams, St. Helens,
et cetera, and skied in the winters. Ran around with a gang of ex-ski-troopers;
we called ourselves the Wolken-schiebers. My parents---and grandparents---were
radicals and atheists, so when I got a chance to go to Reed College
on a scholarship, I took it. With scholarships and odd jobs and greatly
enjoyed tricks of living on nothing, I made it through college, making
it summertimes by trail-crew and logging and labor jobs. And in the
summer of 1948, I hitched to New York and worked on a ship to South
America. I had to wait until I got the ship and I was broke in New York.
For a couple of days, I panhandled for food and slept on park benches,
roaming through Greenwich Village.

"I was very Marxist
in college, but couldn't make it with the regular Commie bunch because
of my individualistic-bohemian-anarchist tendencies, all much looked
down upon. Of course, being the only real member of the proletariat
in the bunch of them, the others being upper middle class New York kids
as a rule, they really couldn't say much. I took anthropology---Indians---and
literature at Reed and got much involved with primitive religion, mythology
and primitive literature---song, ritual, dance---and at about the same
time was beginning to read Far Eastern history and Chinese poetry. I
was married for about six months then and my left-wing wife didn't dig
this sudden interest in Oriental philosophy and Shoshone folk tales.
Out of college, I spent the summer of 1951 as a log-scaler on an Indian
reservation, where I dug the Berry Feast and later made up the poem
about it, and then went on a long hike in the Olympic Mountains. Up
in the mountains, all the notions that had been swarming in my head
crystallized and sort or hung there until the Fall of that year I picked
up a copy of D. T. Suzuki, writing about Zen, and read it while hitchhiking
to a graduate fellowship at Indiana in anthropology. It finished the
job, and although I stayed one semester at Indiana, I was through with
the academic world and headed back West in '52 for what proved to be
five years of mountain jobs, scenes in San Francisco, Chinese language
study, writing poetry, and so on, until I first came to Japan. Then
I was at sea on a tanker for eight months, in San Francisco and back
In Japan again. I love to roam around and I like tough self-discipline,
I don't mind hard work, and being poor never bothered me. I guess that's
what makes it possible to carry on like I do. Being free don't mean
evading necessity, it means outsmarting it."

Snyder's emergence
from the soil of America shows, of course, to what extent the roots
of the Beat Generation are buried there. Whether by the romanticism
which is another root or the realism which is still another, he has
become a symbol of the fellaheen man that Kerouac keeps referring
to---the farmers who give hitchhikers lifts in the rattletrap trucks
that are the latter-day prairie schooners of the West, the blacks who
share their Saturday night wine in the bottle gangs of small-town alleys,
the cowboys who spend the week telling about their weekend love rites
that are sometimes grossly overstated if not overrated, the Mexicans
who always offer a part of the nothing they have, sometimes no more
than vermin hospitality, and sometimes marijuana by candlelight. To
Kerouac, as to other Beats, the fellaheen man, the man of the soil,
the man of the great serf class, is creating his own culture.